POLITICS Comments turned off

Conventional Wisdom About the Democrats’ Primary Is Wrong Conrad Black

Posted By on February 14th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/13/conventional-wisdom-about-the-democrats-primary-is-wrong/

Commentators are scrambling to decide which candidate—Sanders, Buttigieg, or Bloomberg—has the advantage on Super Tuesday. They’re not seeing things clearly.

There are three widely proclaimed verities now bandied about in the aftermath of the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday.

They are that Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is a clear front-runner with a chance for a break-through to a commanding lead in the quest for the nomination. The second is that former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is a serious candidate with a chance for the Democratic nomination, and the third is that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been providentially assisted by the disintegration of the candidacy of former Vice President Joe Biden and the bunching together of Sanders, Buttigieg, and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and will seize the leadership of the race when he gets to the ballot in 15 states simultaneously on Super Tuesday, March 3.

I think all three of these deductions are mistaken.

Bernie Sanders won 60 percent of the vote in New Hampshire in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, where he won about 26 percent this week in an eight-candidate race. But five of the candidates collected 30 percent of the vote, and Sanders only got 26 of the remaining 70, about 36 percent. If the competition is whittled down to Sanders and Buttigieg, who is a much less formidable candidate than Clinton was four years ago, Sanders got about 52 percent of the vote. He did not win the nomination last time, though without the vote-rigging of the Obama-Clinton party establishment and their hundreds of unelected superdelegates, he would have made it a very close race. Still, New Hampshire in 2016 produced a much better vote for Sanders than it did this year.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Trump’s Crackdown on Sanctuary Cities Is Good… . . . but a crackdown on employers would be even better. Nicholas L. Waddy

Posted By on February 14th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/14/trumps-crackdown-on-sanctuary-cities-is-good/

This week, Attorney General Bill Barr’s Department of Justice announced a raft of lawsuits against sanctuary jurisdictions that are undermining the ability of the federal government to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.

So-called sanctuary policies are designed to prevent local and state law enforcement from cooperating with ICE and the Border Patrol. The goal? To nullify federal laws against illegal immigration and shield criminal aliens from deportation.

Now the Trump Administration is fighting back. In addition to Justice Department lawsuits against California, New Jersey, and King County in Washington state, the Department of Homeland Security has made New York residents ineligible to participate in “Trusted Traveler” programs because of that state’s new policies preventing the Department of Motor Vehicles from providing critical information to the Department of Homeland Security. New York residents will be perturbed, but they have only left-wing Governor Andrew Cuomo and a deep-blue state legislature to blame.

It’s about time that the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security started taking seriously their obligation to prioritize the safety of U.S. citizens and to quash, once and for all, the Democrats’ lawlessness.

The crackdown on sanctuary jurisdictions is just the latest in a long series of bold and largely successful efforts by the Trump Administration aimed at suppressing illegal immigration. Trump has ended the disastrous “catch-and-release” policies of the Obama years. No longer will illegals be bussed to their final destinations in the United States and asked politely to turn up for hearings months or years later. Instead, they are detained and rapidly returned to Mexico or their countries of origin.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Unindicted Co-Conspirator of ’93 WTC Bombing Coming to Speak in South Florida February 2020 ICNA banquet featuring Siraj Wahhaj and other Muslim radicals. Joe Kaufman

Posted By on February 14th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/unindicted-co-conspirator-93-wtc-bombing-coming-joe-kaufman/

On February 26, 1993, a truck bomb exploded under the North Tower of the World Trade Center killing six people and injuring over a thousand others. The bomb was meant to collapse the building and, if successful, would have taken the lives of thousands, as we later witnessed during 9/11. On February 22, 2020, just days shy of the 27th anniversary of the ’93 bombing, one of the named unindicted co-conspirators of the attack, Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj, will be the main speaker at the South Florida annual banquet for ICNA Relief. Besides its sorrowful anniversary, this shameful event is a reminder, as well, that radical Islam is thriving in America and that Florida is a hotbed of Islamist activity.

Siraj Wahhaj is the imam of the At-Taqwa Mosque, located in Brooklyn, New York, and the President of the Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA). In 1995, along with Osama bin Laden and bin Laden’s mentor, Abdullah Azzam, Wahhaj was named by the US government as an “unindicted co-conspirator” for a federal trial dealing with the 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) bombing. Wahhaj had been linked to the bomb-maker of the attack, Clement Rodney Hampton-El, and during the trial, he was a character witness for the spiritual leader of the attack, the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, whom Wahhaj has openly praised.

Wahhaj recently made the news, when his son, two daughters, son-in-law and daughter-in-law were arrested on charges of abusing children at an alleged terrorist training compound in New Mexico. According to Reuters, “Eleven children ranging from 1 to 15 years of age were found ragged and starving.” Another child and grandson of Wahhaj, 3-year-old Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj, was found dead at the compound, after his reported abduction by Wahhaj’s son, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, from the Atlanta, Georgia home of the child’s mother. According to prosecutors, the children were being trained at the compound to commit school shootings.

This month, Wahhaj will be the keynote speaker at the 2020 annual banquet for ICNA Relief, taking place at the Marriott Coral Springs Hotel and Convention Center. The location has become a go-to venue for radical Muslim events, as the Hamas-related Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) just held their annual banquet there, this past October.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Trump Demands Justice for Victims of Sanctuary Cities It’s time for leftist jailers who free dangerous illegal aliens to pay the price. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on February 14th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/trump-demands-justice-victims-sanctuary-cities-matthew-vadum/

Crime victims harmed by dangerous illegal aliens should be able to sue the so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that unleashed them on an unwitting public in defiance of federal immigration authorities, President Donald Trump declared in his State of the Union address. At the same time, he endorsed pending legislation that would accomplish this goal.

This is another politically astute immigration-related proposal from Trump who demonstrates time and time again that he is one of the few Republican presidents in modern American history who actually knows how to fight the Left. It puts the illegal alien-coddlers and open-borders fanatics on the defensive and educates the public in clearly understandable terms about who the bad guys really are in this fight over the nation’s future. It comes almost a year after Trump proposed shipping immigration detainees to sanctuary cities, which are Democrat strongholds.

As FrontPage readers know, the sanctuary movement gave illegal aliens permission to rob, rape, and murder Americans by, among other things, stigmatizing immigration enforcement. Some left-wingers call sanctuary jurisdictions “civil liberties safe zones” to blur the distinction between citizens and non-citizens by implying illegal aliens somehow possess a civil right to be present in the U.S. Leftists also like to refer to all migrants, including illegal aliens, simply as “immigrants” in order to further muddy the waters. This helps the Left portray conservatives, who are generally not anti-immigrant –they’re anti-illegal immigration— as xenophobic bigots.

Sanctuary cities really ought to be called traitor cities because they are in open rebellion against the United States just as much as the Confederate Army was when it opened fire on Fort Sumter.

President Trump railed against the sanctuary laws of California in his address.

“Senator Thom Tillis has introduced legislation to allow Americans like Jody to sue sanctuary cities and states when a loved one is hurt or killed as a result of these deadly practices,” Trump said Feb. 4, referring to Jody Jones, a guest at the speech whose brother, Rocky Jones, was allegedly shot and killed by two-time deportee Gustavo Garcia, an illegal alien wanted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Local authorities in California ignored ICE and let Garcia go.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The #MeToo movement ignored a Ninth Circuit judge guilty of terrible misconduct By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on February 14th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/the_metoo_movement_ignored_a_ninth_circuit_judge_guilty_of_terrible_misconduct.html

In December 2017, the #MeToo movement claimed Judge Alex Kozinski, widely recognized as one of the most brilliant judges on the Ninth Circuit. Kozinski was also a libertarian in an activist circuit. Ironically, it now turns out that his close friend, the late Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a judicial activist, was the real sexual harasser.

At the #MeToo movement’s height, around fifteen women claimed that Kozinski, a Romanian-born child of Holocaust survivors, had sexually harassed them. Their charges ranged from his showing female clerks pornography, to using trying to read a hidden label name tag as an excuse to touch the woman’s breast, to kissing both male and female lawyers on the cheeks.

An interesting aspect of Kozinski’s departure was that one of the main people to help push him out was Heidi Bond, who alleged that Kozinski showed her pornography on the office computer, asked inappropriate questions, and was generally abusive to her.

Bond was in the news again in December 2019 because of her alternative career as bestselling romance novelist Courtney Milan. The Romance Writers of America kick Bond out after she used social media to accuse other romance novelists of racism. Bond, who is half Chinese, wrote on Twitter that one novelist’s 1999 work was a “f**king racist mess.”

While conceding that she not read the book, Bond found offensive the way the novel described its Chinese heroine. It was a vicious attack against a book that tried to write with sympathy (whether successfully or not) about a different culture two decades before “cultural appropriation” was a thing. Bond’s role in two attacks from the left, one against a judge and the other against an author, doesn’t mean that her accusations were wrong. Still, her commitment to identity politics is noteworthy.

The real irony is that the truly vile judge on the Ninth Circuit wasn’t Kozinski, it was Judge Stephen Reinhardt, an activist judge and an icon of the left. Although Reinhardt died in 2018, a House Judiciary subcommittee heard testimony on Thursday about Reinhardt’s incredibly abusive, demeaning conduct towards Oliva Warren, a female clerk:

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Two-step Solution to The Palestinian Problem By Ted Belman

Posted By on February 14th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/the_twostep_solution_to_the_palestinian_problem_.html

Last week, the Trump team tabled  “Peace to Prosperity” otherwise known as The Deal of the Century, in which they set out their vision for achieving peace. It includes the creation of a Palestinian “state.”  The Palestinian leadership was quick to reject it as did the Arab League and many others, including many Israelis.

Nobody believes the “state” will come to be.

Surely the Trump team knows this. So, why did they table the vision?

In my opinion, the Trump team wanted to present a new vision to replace the old vision. During the next four years they will advance their vision and negate the old vision.

The old vision was based on the Oslo Accords signed in 1993 and 1995, and the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which demanded 100% withdrawal by Israel.  In addition, it demanded the right of return for all Palestinian refugees and the division of Jerusalem. 

This vision was premised on the Palestinian narrative that presented the Palestinians as indigenous and the Israelis as interlopers, oppressors and occupiers.

According to Peace to Prosperity,

“The Oslo Accords, however, left numerous key issues unresolved pending the completion of permanent status negotiations, including, among other items, borders, security, refugees and Jerusalem. Those agreements did not create an effective path for neutralizing the kinds of crises that emerged during the implementation of Oslo, including waves of terror and violence.”

The Accords became a permanent constitution articulating the division of powers between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) over Parts A, B and C as delineated by the Accords.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Attorney General Bill Barr rebukes Trump’s tweets about Roger Stone By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on February 14th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/attorney_general_bill_barr_rebukes_trumps_tweets_about_roger_stone.html

Trump’s spokesman responds by saying that Trump has the same right as any other citizen to comment on a miscarriage of justice.

It’s hard to tell whether the apparent tension between President Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr is real or is a way to create the appearance of some separation between Barr and Trump on the subject of Roger Stone. The facts are straightforward, but still open to interpretation.

Bob Mueller and his bad boys went after Roger Stone with a level of ferocity far in excess of any wrongdoing Stone had allegedly committed. Although Stone is a non-violent, first-time offender who allegedly committed a crime that is the norm in Washington D.C. (lying to Congress, something that James Clapper, for example, did with impunity), Mueller’s team arranged for a pre-dawn SWAT style raid on Stone to arrest him, complete with a conveniently present CNN team; a multi-pronged indictment; a jury foreman who openly despised Trump and everyone around him; and a shopped judge who loathes Trump too.

At the end of the day, Mueller’s prosecutors got Stone convicted on seven counts, including lying to Congress, obstructing an official proceeding, and witness tampering (that is, threats to a potential witness who found Stone’s angry fulminations laughable). Then, the Mueller gang went in for the kill, demanding that Mueller, who is now 67, be sentenced to seven to nine years in prison. This excessive demand can only stem from malevolence and the need to send a warning to Trump associates, akin to the mafia promising a few broken kneecaps for people who don’t play along.

Immediately after the prosecutors made their sentencing demand, Trump tweeted out that the sentencing request was corrupt and evil, as well as taking swipes at the judge and the prosecutors:

At roughly the same time, the Justice Department intervened to ask the court not to consider the specific request for seven to ten years. Instead, it gave the judge more leeway by recommending only an unspecified term as the judge saw fit. Democrats predictably exploded, accusing Trump of interfering with justice.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The United Nations Once Again Proves Its Anti-Semitism By David Harsanyi

Posted By on February 14th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/the-united-nations-once-again-proves-its-anti-semitism/

The U.N. Human Rights Council disproportionately focuses on Israel.

The depraved totalitarians, nefarious barbarians, two-bit gangsters, odious scoundrels, and bigoted scum who run the United Nations recently set up a new “database” to help anti-Semites around the world target Jewish businesses in the disputed territories of Judaea and Samaria — businesses that offer economic opportunities for Palestinians that pay higher than most other jobs in the West Bank.

In no other international dispute — and there are hundreds of them — does the United Nations target peaceful civilians or institutions. Certainly in no place do they work to destroy the businesses of noncombatants based on their ethnicity or religion. The 112 companies on the U.N.’s list are run and staffed, no doubt, by people with diverse viewpoints, at least some of whom likely support the creation of a Palestinian state. All of them create jobs, products, and services that foster cooperation.

None of this matters to the U.N. The “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” (BDS) campaign, now supported by the U.N., is a coordinated international effort committed to the elimination of the Jewish state, bringing together dictators, theocrats, terrorist organizations, Communists, the “international community,” and at least one of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s top surrogates. The movement targets Jews under the guise of anti-Zionism, which remains the predominant justification for violence, murder, and hatred against Jews in Europe and the Middle East.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

ATTACKS ON TRUMP SUPPORTERS…..APPALLING

Posted By on February 14th, 2020

Florida Man Attacks Trump Supporters With … a Cane Sword
By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/trending/florida-man-attacks-trump-supporters-with-a-cane-sword/

Peaceful Florida citizens holding Trump signs were minding their own business in Dunnellon, Fla., last Thursday when a man rushed at them with a cane sword.

Police arrested 49-year-old James L. Whitehurst II and charged him with 10 counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and one count of disorderly conduct, the Ocala Star Banner reported.

Victims reportedly told police that Whitehurst had approached them during their peaceful assembly with what was described as a cane sword. The assailant allegedly pointed the sword in their faces and made threatening statements, holding the blade 6 inches from their faces.

Whitehurst confessed to having removed the sword from its holder and pointing it at the Trump supporters. He told police he meant no harm by the threatening action.

New Hampshire Man Assaults Pro-Trump Teenager at Polling Site, Leaving Him ‘Traumatized’
By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/trending/new-hampshire-man-assaults-pro-trump-teenager-at-polling-site-leaving-him-traumatized/

A New Hampshire man was arrested Thursday afternoon “after allegedly assaulting a 15-year-old Trump supporter and two adults at a polling site during the state’s first-in-the-nation primary earlier this week,” Fox News exclusively reports. The teen’s mother told Fox News that the assault left her son “traumatized.”

Patrick Bradley, 34, of Windham, N.H., was charged with simple assault and disorderly conduct.

Bradley reportedly got in the face of the teenage boy who was wearing a red MAGA hat and volunteering at the local high school, which was a polling place for the New Hampshire primary.

The boy’s mother described the incident involving her son in an interview with Fox News. “My son stayed home from school on Tuesday for a doctor’s appointment and we drove by the high school to go vote. When we got there, we saw Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, and my son was over the moon,” she said. “My son is the most patriotic kid you’d ever meet in your life.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘Bears for Palestine’ Celebrates Terrorists at UC Berkeley By P. David Hornik

Posted By on February 14th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/trending/bears-for-palestine-celebrates-terrorists-at-uc-berkeley/

Algemeiner, a website for Jewish and Israel news, reports that a group at the University of California, Berkeley, called Bears for Palestine, “us[ed] its dedicated cubicle space to display photos” of Palestinian terrorists—namely Fatima Bernawi, Rasmea Odeh, and Leila Khaled, “the latter seen wielding an AK-47 assault rifle.”

Bernawi was reportedly “the first Palestinian woman to organize an attack in Israel, placing a bomb [which didn’t explode] in a Jerusalem cinema in 1967. Rasmea Odeh was involved in a 1969 terror bombing in a Jerusalem supermarket that killed two Israeli students, Leon Kanner and Eddie Joffe. Sentenced in Israel to life in prison, she was freed in a prisoner exchange; in 2017 she was deported from the U.S. to Jordan for lying on immigration forms.

As for Leila Khaled—who, like Rasmea Odeh, is affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), designated by the U.S. as a terror organization and responsible for multiple suicide bombings—she was involved in the hijacking of a TWA plane in 1969 and an (Israeli) El Al plane in 1970 and is considered a Palestinian icon.

Back at UC Berkeley, on February 3, the student senate met to vote on a bill to condemn Bears for Palestine for the pro-terror display. “More than 200 people showed up…with many Jewish and Zionist students coming out to back the resolution, while Bears for Palestine members and supporters gathered to oppose it.”

Two hours later, “Jewish students collectively left the meeting” after deciding “that enough was enough and that [they] were not going to sit idly by as [their] members were threatened and harassed.”